Love
Worth remembering that Rupert Brooke died at a young age. An age when love is a theme in just about any work. Scholars have detected a dualistic approach to Brooke’s treatment of women, however; one might even suggest that he was a borderline Borderline: the women in his verse are either up on a pedestal or down in the gutter. The seeming inability of Brooke to reconcile his two views have led to a thematic sensibility easily distinguished. Like many writers of great wit, he uses humor to deflect his conflicted feelings.
Death
Just as Brooke’s young age infused his poetic themes with expressions of tormented conflict over how to approach women, so did the times into which he was thrust lend his poetry an obsession with death. The dawning of the Great War was not the subject at work here; his 1914 and Other Poems are sonnet that reflect the recognition of a changing world still trying to come to term with the turn of the century. Brooke’s true thematic obsession is not death per se, but the longing for death as a response to an existential crisis brought on a changing society.
Immortality
Brooke’s poems about this longing for death would merely be cryptic and morose if they were not constructed upon a foundation that with death comes something greater. The collapse of the continental Old World fashioned for the Europeans a sense that what was to come in the 20th century would unquestionably be different, but different is not always better even when the promise lures with that expectation. Beyond death is a sense of leaving everything behind and genuinely having the power to become immortal. Immortality is an epic Modernist concern and in this state, Brooke delineates a lyrical promise grander than what the turn of the century could ever mandate.
